Why Jeopardy! Has Lasted 50 Years

A game show of Pure Skill, or as close as we've come to one

It is the 50th anniversary of Jeopardy! this month, which is really quite a testament to many things, from Merv Griffin's developmental brilliance to our insatiable appetite for feats of strength that require no actual physical strength. It's hard to explain how any form of entertainment could survive five decades these disposable days, but I would like to float a theory. My belief is that Jeopardy! has survived and will continue to survive because it is hard.

If you break down any contest to its essence, it will fall somewhere on a long spectrum that starts with Pure Luck and ends with Pure Skill. The lottery is an obvious example of Pure Luck, and it's equally obvious why stupid people are drawn to it. Moving along that spectrum, poker is a good example of a game that falls somewhere in the middle. It involves some significant element of chance, but it rewards skill more often than it rewards luck, which is why the same clutch of weird assholes keeps raking in pots. At the other extreme, devising a duel of Pure Skill isn't easy, because there are very few competitions that can be designed to eliminate luck as a factor completely, but something like the javelin throw is the best we can do: a simple and equitable contest, resistant to the influence of uncontrollable outside forces, that rewards genetics and practice and not much else.

Jeopardy! in the 1970s with its original host Art Fleming. (Credit: Everett.)

The same range exists in the world of game shows. Toward the Pure Luck end of the spectrum loiter dunce-games like Deal or No Deal, Let's Make a Deal, or Press Your Luck before Michael Larson cracked the shit out of it. Like lotteries, game shows founded on randomness and guesswork are custom-built to give hope to the hopeless. A show like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire is more skillful, although as with poker, luck remains part of its equation. Does that day's small collection of questions dovetail with your particular wisdoms? Did you pick the right friend to phone? A game show you might remember called The Joker's Wild tried to make a virtue out of just such an equitable weighting of chance and talent: "The game where knowledge is king and Lady Luck is queen."

A game show that provides an opportunity for its contestants to be immortal has a better chance of becoming immortal itself.

Now, after all this time, Jeopardy! remains the closest we've come to the javelin throw of game shows. It is, in short, the game show that requires the highest degree of Pure Skill — both a vast knowledge base and very quick access to the brain's darkest reaches. (I made it through the early qualification rounds of Jeopardy! to play in a simulated game, and that's when I really understood how much speed factors into the final result. It is a massive determinant.) Any idiot can win the slots. A very small percentage of the population could conceivably win a game of Jeopardy!

The only element of chance that has been introduced to its otherwise perfectly logic-based system is the Daily Double. There are entire articles to be written on its chaotic genius, but mostly it is Merv Griffin's concession to our collective need for life, or at least for our entertainments, not to be a true meritocracy. Even smart game shows need to give underdogs an opening, and each episode's Daily Doubles offer three tiny windows to those of us who might dream that we will someday be the lucky ones. Hit those Daily Doubles and bet big and correctly on yourself and the outcome of a lopsided game can be reversed in seconds. I suspect the Daily Double is central to Jeopardy!'s success. It makes a game that might otherwise be too rarefied just slightly more accessible to the dreamer majority.

Ken Jennings faces off against the IBM Watson computer. (Credit: AP.)

Yet even with those Daily Doubles in place, we still see what happens when a truly great player enters the Jeopardy! field: He or she can roll the table, and there is no truer evidence that a competition is skill-based than the potential for dominance. The design of Jeopardy! made a machine like Ken Jennings possible. Nobody gets lucky 74 times in a row. Only skill gives you 74 times in a row, and there lies, I believe, the principal reason Jeopardy! has lasted. In some strange way, a game show that provides an opportunity for its contestants to be immortal has a better chance of becoming immortal itself.

In fact, one of the few design faults in the early iterations of Jeopardy! was the five-game term limit it imposed on its best contestants. Why should you expect to survive — you, the Creator — if you've constructed a universe in which you've made it impossible for longevity to exist? Only stripping the game of that self-imposed governor has allowed Jeopardy! to defeat what might have proved its lethal enemy, the same ruthless force that murders our love for so many things: technology, and more specifically the Internet.

The Price Is Right was once a game of perhaps surprising skill; it rewarded preparation, at least. Its producers responded to the threat of technology — which allowed its players to become even more prepared — by upping the levels of chance, turning The Price Is Right into a carnival more than quiz show. Its producers decided the answer to their modern problems was Pure Luck, and I would argue the game became dumber, and thus more likely doomed, because of it.

Jeopardy!, fortunately, went the opposite way. The Internet should have killed it by making its premise obsolete. What's the value of knowing anything when all of us can access that knowledge in each of our glowing pockets? Instead, the Internet has allowed players to become even better — to study and strategize more efficiently, to correct their own weaknesses and to exploit those in the game itself — and Jeopardy!, unlike The Price Is Right, has invited them to demonstrate their newfound superiority. Most of the game's iconic players — Jennings, Roger Craig, and most recently the strangely controversial Arthur Chu — aren't just citizens of the Internet Age. They are products of it. Instead of closing the door to them and their enhanced gifts, Jeopardy!, more than ever in its 50-year history, is celebrating them. It is putting the javelin in their hands and clearing the field in front of them and saying: Here, throw this thing as far as you fucking can.

And nothing has ever held our attention like the belief that the best is yet to come.

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